Papers › Confident Naturalness Explanation (CNE): A Framework to Explain and Assess Patterns...
Confident Naturalness Explanation (CNE): A Framework to Explain and Assess Patterns Forming Naturalness
Ahmed Emam, Mohamed Farag, Ribana Roscher
Protected natural areas are regions that have been minimally affected by human activities such as urbanization, agriculture, and other human interventions. To better understand and map the naturalness of these areas, machine learning models can be used to analyze satellite imagery. Specifically, explainable machine learning methods show promise in uncovering patterns that contribute to the concept of naturalness within these protected environments. Additionally, addressing the uncertainty inherent in machine learning models is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of this concept. However, existing approaches have limitations. They either fail to provide explanations that are both valid and objective or struggle to offer a quantitative metric that accurately measures the contribution of specific patterns to naturalness, along with the associated confidence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called the Confident Naturalness Explanation (CNE) framework. This framework combines explainable machine learning and uncertainty quantification to assess and explain naturalness. We introduce a new quantitative metric that describes the confident contribution of patterns to the concept of naturalness. Furthermore, we generate an uncertainty-aware segmentation mask for each input sample, highlighting areas where the model lacks knowledge. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we apply it to a study site in Fennoscandia using two open-source satellite datasets.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections